The Politics of Mourning in Early China by Miranda Brown (review)

Book Reviews 129 moral submission from all. The humble aspect in ruling as son and younger brother and the caring aspect in ruling as father and mother of the people, according to Birdwhistell, resemble women’s roles as wives and mothers. In addition, Mencius’s four beginnings that take the feeling of compassion as the most basic of all, illustrated by the example of a child falling into a well (2A6), resemble maternal compassionate impulses. A more obvious reference to maternal caring can be seen in the Mohists’ characterization of the way of Ru 儒 as comparable to the way that parents attend to their new born infant. Mencius, in his response, takes this statement to mean that there must be priority given to one’s parents over strangers (3A5). A benevolent ruler must then begin with imitating the maternal activity of caring for the vulnerable, both young and old. The centrality of caring activities and the feeling of compassion, in a word, sets Mencius’s humane ruler apart from the dominant self-centered masculinity of King Hui at the time. But despite the affinities between Mencius’s compassionate ruler and feminist care ethics, Birdwhistell insists on the patriarchal, hierarchal nature of all Chinese intellectual thought. As she writes in chapter one as well as in the conclusion, Chinese philosophy is an affair of elite men and the masculine ideal developed under this pretence is not applicable to women (pp. 136-7). Birdwhistell’s rejection of the resiliency of Mencius’s thought indeed presents a problem in bridging Confucian ethics and feminist care ethics, despite the fact that both take maternal thinking and caring activities as paradigmatic, not just in the realm of personal relationship, but also in the wider world of politics and human community. If the question here is whether Mencius is sexist and whether his intended audience is male, the answer is obviously a “yes,” given the original historical and social context. But then that is true of most human traditions, whether East or West, South or North. So the real issue here, as I see it, is whether we can acknowledge Mencius’s inevitable human-all-toohuman shortcomings in the discourse on gender, race, and class, and, at the same time, celebrate the novelty of his benevolent, compassionate ruler in the face of today’s political reality in which maternal care and compassion are viewed as irrelevant to the masculine discourse on power. And I think in the end the answer for feminists or non-feminists alike should as well be a resounding “yes.” LI-HSIANG LISA ROSENLEE, University of Hawai‘i–West O‘ahu The Politics of Mourning in Early China MIRANDA BROWN. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007. xiv, 205 pages. ISBN 978-0-7914-7157-9. US$75.00 hardcover. Miranda Brown, in her first book, explicitly refrains from making grand claims about either her period (Han 漢, 206 BCE-220 CE) or her topic (mourning practices and policies), instead 130 Journal of Chinese Religions preferring the “open-endedness of historical interpretation” (p. 7). Her book, indeed, moves forward in very concrete steps, question by question. How to evaluate the deeply engrained Weberian views on filial piety that privilege the father-son relation, and see it as a training ground for dutiful service to one’s Lord? Is Emperor Wen’s 文 edict of 157 BCE to be taken as a prohibition on the observance of three years mourning? Are the classical texts (including the Analects [Lunyu 論語], Mencius [Mengzi 孟子], Classic of Filial Piety [Xiaojing 孝經], Gongyang’s Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals [Gongyang zhuan 公羊傳], Book of Rites [Liji 禮記], Annals of Lü [Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋]) as insistent on a son’s obligation to mourn his parents for three years as is often assumed? Can the greater prominence during the Eastern Han of accounts of mourning be attributed to changes in imperial policy? Do the dynastic histories dealing with the Eastern Han (25-220 CE) reflect the realities of the period or Six Dynasties sensibilities? Her answers to these and many other questions are always subtle, fair, and interesting, as she consistently refuses to take common assumptions for granted. Nonetheless, out of this concatenation...